Question posed on a local
discussion newspaper board: As far as Indian
mascots, I need one thing explained to me. Teams have had Indian names for
decades and decades but why are they only offensive now? If the name is so
horribly racist and offensive, why was the name used in the first place? Or, if
it's so bad then why wasn't it changed 50 years ago? Or 25 years ago? Why is it
only a problem now? What am I missing?
Response: By way of analogy, why did it take until 1965 to abolish legal segregation?
Didn’t people realize it was immoral earlier? Sometimes it takes a rise of
historical consciousness plus the passage of laws for such matters to take effect.
Otherwise, we would still have laws and supportive mores against interracial
marriage and legal segregation would have remained intact.
Elaboration: To provide additional
context, legal segregation was widely accepted in the South from the late 19th
century until the 1960s. Through the collective impact of the Civil Rights
movement, which remained a vital force throughout the 20th century, many legal
and social walls, which kept legal segregation in place, began to crumble. This
Movement reached its symbolic fulfillment in the 1963 March on Washington and
the historic civil rights legislation passed by Congress in 1964 and 1965 under
the leadership of President Lyndon B. Johnson. That, along with the unanimous
Brown vs the Board of Education (1954) which declared the Plessy vs Ferguson
(1896) Supreme Court decision null and void—one that gave legal standing to the
"separate but equal doctrine." The 1954 decision provided the legal
platform to end legal segregation, which opened the gateway for social values
to follow, albeit through much travail, which can only be viewed—even today—as
a partial victory for social and racial justice.
To the point on how one
explains a change in social values. The simple—undeniable— explanation is that
social attitudes are transformed as an inevitable product of historical change.
In the matter of civil rights for African Americans, a gradual national change
in attitudes was the result of many arrests, many protests, repugnance against a
great deal of white rage (e.g., that crowd of screaming adults yelling at those
young black kids seeking entrance into Central High School in 1957), and the
inspiring vision of Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hammer, and Martin Luther King,
among many others.
The Civil Rights
Movement of the 1960s resulted in some great political victories for African
Americans, particularly in the South and for the entire nation, in helping to
undue a great injustice. But given the cumulative impact of 350 years of
systematic racism, there was still much work to be done. This is evident in the
in the gutting of the Civil Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013, the current
effort of Republican-based states to suppress minority voting, the fabricated war
on Critical Race Theory and the sanitizing of the U.S. History curriculum in
the public schools, and the continuing impact of structural racism in the urban
sector. In short, despite the great victories of the Civil Rights Movement of
the 1960s, there has been a retreat—a backlash—on the matter of racial justice
in this nation in the past decade. To the point at hand, victories secured in
one era do not guarantee that they will remain intact in a later time. The
so-called Redemption in the South—redeeming the glories of planation life and
the false depiction of the happy slave—after the short-lived Reconstruction Era
(1866-1877) is sad commentary of that. Rights gained in the 1960s should have
been stabilized by the 1880s. Instead, the collective power of white rage
brought in another reality—the self-evident normality of legal segregation, reinforced
through the courts, state legislatures, and the KKK— which required a
sustained, almost century long, counter movement to change.
In terms of the
specific issue at hand on appropriate nomenclature for sports teams, a similar
rise in consciousness has emerged in the past 20-30 years on the complex
history of the interface between European and Native Americans civilizations in
the Americas, that included the role of colonization, land displacement, and
slow genocide, without which the United States, as we currently know it, would
not have come into place. There is much here to ponder. My short response is
that when those sports names first appeared, many stereotypical notions about Native
Americans permeated the US culture, reinforced by mythical TV and Hollywood
versions of the West. Such caricatures that were pervasive in the first half of
the 20th century, have since undergone much critical scrutiny. Part of the reassessment
in attitudes includes severe questioning of any continuing utilization of
Native American nomenclature for sports teams.
The simple response to the
question raised is that changing attitudes on this matter are related to revisions
in historical and cultural conditions. To wit, such matters as the
representation of Native Americans in the public square have evolved. As history
and culture have changed, so have public attitudes.
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